Francis Crick, the guy who co-discovered the molecular structure of DNA back in 1953, died nine years ago. Along with James Watson, he won a Nobel Prize for the groundbreaking scientific discovery — but his family now wants to get rid of it. According to Heritage Auctions, bidding for the gold medal and diploma will start at, ahem, $250,000.

Nobody has tried to sell a Nobel medal in 70 years, so the final price will establish a new and interesting precedent as far as these things go.

Mann hasn’t the merit, but he’s likely got the money for a Nobel Prize. Of course, that would likely diminish the value of all other medals, but that’s the consequence of dealing with a “climate scientist” of his caliber.

Still a bit dicey. Mann could purchase the medal and diploma. However the Nobel Prize comes with a hefty sum of cash (about $1.2 million). He wouldn’t be getting that, he’d be paying out. But in Mannian Statistics(TM) where up and down don’t make a difference, I guess it all would work out.

M. Mann (the AMO man) may be Nobel prize’winner’, but my Geo-Solar geomagnetic based AMO reconstruction appear to have higher correlation, despite protestations from some other quartershttp://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AMO-recon.htm

Mann’s a leftist.
A Berkeley grad and activist that can be seen hobnobbing with leftist Democrats all the time in his promotion of climate change. The hockey stick was a fabrication, consistent with the needs of a leftist ideology that wants to tone down the human footprint (in other words: de-industrialize).
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States… [we] must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth.” -John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing …” -leftist Senator Tim Wirth, 1993
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s doing, but its not helping the cause.” -Michael Mann, Climategate Email
“We have to offer up [fabricated] scary scenarios… each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective [lying] and being honest [ineffective].” -Stephen Schneider, lead ipcc author, 1989
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” -Paul Watson, Greenpeace
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.” -Daniel Botkin, ex Chair of Enironmental Studies, UCSB

See, this is exactly why the congress should’ve negotiated with Obama and given him additional tax increases (after all, it’s not our money anyway) so the US could avoid the upcoming sequester. Now, where will that public servant (ok, it’s just a term, it doesn’t really mean anything) in Washington find the money to purchase a Nobel Prize (under the auspices of research funding) for our Dr. Michael Mann. Sure, Mikey will not have actually ‘won’ it, but this is not the world of reality. The world of reality is a fantasy. The world of fantasy is the world of reality. And with a surreal Nobel Prize under Mikey’s generously proportioned belt the Obama administration could at least only semi-falsely claim (you know: the old argument; is the cup half true, or the cup half false?) that they spent taxpayer money only semi-wastefully on semi-useful research into fantasy (the new reality) global climate… warming… change… whatever, and with the authority of that illusionary, yet real, Nobel Prize winning research proceed to enact destructive climate mitigating policies that actually will destroy our pay checks, crash the economy, and so on. Now, Michael Mann won’t get a virtual Nobel Prize, Obama can’t claim to be virtual savior of the planet and will, instead, have to destroy our pay checks, crash the economy, and so on, with illusionary budget cuts in a sequester. Not quite so high falutin’ noble (sorry about the pun) a means to acquire his transformative (a surreal word if there ever was one – and nasty too) change. Life’s tough for Michael Mann and Barack Obama.

Why spend all that money when you can just do cocktails with the biased Nobel committee members for a new one. A few side gifts from WWF and others might need to be leveraged also, but that is a technicality.

A quarter of a million dollars?
So, if I sell my share of the EU’s Peace Prize (about one five-hundred-milionth part) – unless I’ve missed a zero or two [Mann and Auto both have ‘a’s, so it may be possible] – then I will raise one two-thousandth of a greenback – one twentieth part of a cent.
Hey Michael – yours for fifty bucks, cash!
Then you [like my cats] will be a partial recipient – no mere contributor with photocopied A4 certificate – to a Nobel Peace Prize.

OK – Sarc off. [I hope you didn’t think the above comments were too serious . . . . ]
I think it a pity that Crick’s family are, seemingly, having to sell.
I’ll not ride my hobby-horse about the state of the West [and the UK certainly not excepted!].

I think we could avoid a lot if expense if we just fabricate the Nobel medal on a 3d printer, give it to Mike and tell him it’s a real Nobel Prize. Remember, his standard if evidence is really, really low for things he wants to believe.

We should not forget there are two types of Nobel prize, the one for real scientific achievement and the other one for ‘peace’, traditionally awarded to all sorts of dubious individuals.

I think we should wait until someone wants to put up a Nobel Peace Prize for sale before we organise a whip round on behalf of Michael. The one on offer is for real scientific achievement and there is little doubt Michael would never be so brash as to claim he ever had anything to do with anything like that.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is kind of like winning today’s Iranian prize for human rights, or the old Soviet Union’s peace prize – it has become so demeaned as to have absolutely no value whatsoever. Doubtless his Goreness would disagree, but that just goes to prove my point.

Well it is a bit too late to give it to the lady scientist who actually did the X-ray crystallography, that led to the discovery of the DNA structure. She unfortunately died too soon to be recognised for her part in unravelling DNA.

Well if I had that medal, I would melt it down for the gold content. There’s a lot of medals running around with asterisks after them.

George, thanks for that tip. Would you believe that I’d never heard of Rosalind Franklin until you prompted me to look that up? I honestly do not recall her being mentioned in any of my texts books in college or high school.
(And there’s a reason I keep coming back to WUWT… and reading the comments.)

>>We should not forget there are two types of Nobel prize, the one for real scientific achievement and the other one for ‘peace’, traditionally awarded to all sorts of dubious individuals.<<

Sorry. If they are going to put the name "Nobel" on the price, and lend it their prestige, then I am unwilling to make any distinction between the "peace" prize and any other. Whether you are a scientist or not, whether you have done something momentous or not, you should turn down the prize as a matter of principle, IMHO. If enough people turn it down, they'll get the message.

After some thought, I really hope a reputable museum ponies up the cash for this, and displays it alongside some of the work that merited the award. Perhaps it could find a place in or near this:http://www.genome.gov/Smithsonian/

Actually it is SO much cheaper just to go ahead and buy a copy of PrintMaster or a program like that, design and print your OWN award – maybe call it the Noball Prize, as an example, and just have some notary emboss it with their stamp and not point out the difference to people when you “say this is my Nobel certificate.”

If M. Mann were to buy this then he would be correct in stating “I have a Nobel Medal”. Not the same as having been awarded the Nobel Prize but obfuscation is the order of the day with many in this area.

If Mann was smarter, but no less shifty, he would emulate economists and use some of his grant money to endow a “Prize in Climate Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”, then just wait a few years for the lazy media and populace to refer to it incorrectly as a true Nobel prize.

“I’m still amused by the fact that they won the Nobel Peace Prize and not the one in physics”
Yes, and remember that the Peace Prize is chosen by the parliament in Oslo Norway, not the Nobel Committee in Sweden. The questionable choices for the peace prize including Obama and Arafat, have come about more from political considerations rather than any evidence that the recipients have enhanced world peace.